Time for my annual back-to-schoolcolumn focused on kids, schools, and the role of learning technology.
Every time I think I know a lotabout technology, some 12-year-old proves otherwise. Although I embrace the digitalage and strongly advocate for using technology in education, I am, and willalways be, what Mark Prensky calls a digital immigrant.I adapted to technology, but I wasn’t born into it.
Not so with today’s students. Theyare digital natives. They are betterat it than most of their parents or their teachers. Outside their educationalenvironment, they are using technology to learn, and to collaborate,communicate, and document their own lives. They have grown up with technology,and technology is part of them. What should we be doing inside the educational environment?
Is technology changing, or are the students changing?
We have been incorporatingtechnology into schools for 60 years, from filmstrips to interactive video and,now, the web and social media. For sure, learning technology has changed theschools, but primarily by changing how content is stored and presented, not bysignificantly altering how learning takes place—at least not yet.
As the Internet and mobiletechnologies pervaded our lives, we didn’t quite understand how these changeswould impact schooling. So we resisted. As a member of my local school boardfor six years, I could see that we didn’t really know what to do with the web. Sure,we got on the Internet bandwagon, but the need to protect kids from bad sites—porn,predators, identity thieves, unscrupulous sales pitches, criminal elements,etc.—was, at first, much more of a driver in our strategy (or lack thereof) thanfiguring out how to use the technology to benefit education, even though wetalked about it, a lot.
We struggled with determiningwhat was appropriate beyond the obvious. So we erred on the side of caution. WasWikipedia a reliable source? Were different interpretations of history helpfulto young learners? Were un-cited sources useful or detrimental? What aboutparental rights to determine what their children could see online? We debatedand even stressed out a little over all of it. We also banned cell phones,assuming they would be a distraction to learning and an invitation to cheat ontests.
Lately, we have learned to chilla little. Many schools now provide mobile computers to all students, evenallowing them to bring their own devices, including smartphones, to school. Computingskills are no longer optional. It’s not so much a resignation that “if youcan’t beat ’em, join ’em,” than it is a realization that students in schooltoday are fundamentally different when it comes to technology than the studentsof just a generation ago. For many of them, being cut off from technology isalmost as bad as having your arm cut off (or so they tell me).
The new push in learningtechnology at the school level is not just using it to present content, butusing is as a research, analytical, and communications tool. The use of technologyis a given; what comes out of that usage—and what kids do with it—is whatreally matters.
Key considerations
So now the emphasis is to openup education to personal technology and enable students to use it wisely andproductively. To do this requires five key considerations:
- Retraining faculty to employ technologyas more than just an easy way to deliver PowerPoint presentations, and movingthem to incorporate technology as an essential resource for changing how students learn.
- Rethinking the concept of the library, andthe role of librarians, from a place where physical content is stored to a broad-basedaccess point into the digital knowledge universe. Just as most of us learned touse the card catalog when we were in school, we must teach students to useweb-based research tools in a similar way.
- Helping students become good contentconsumers. Their openness to tech makes it easy if we do it right. Don’tautomatically assume tech-savvy kids are equally knowledge savvy. We must helpthem be smart, thoughtful consumers of Internet-based content, so they can tellgood content from bad; and we must help them use the web, and each other, tolearn faster and more comprehensively than ever before. Content curationbecomes more important than ever.
- Helping students become good content contributors.It’s easier than ever for everyone to be both a content consumer and a content creator. How will wesupport students as they build their own content? This is more than good contentdesign; it’s also the appropriate awareness of what to publish and what not topublish, and the impacts (positive and negative) the content will have onothers who consume it.
- Parental education. While it’scertainly true that most kids can teach their parents a thing or two abouttechnology, it is up to parents to embrace new models for how that technologyis used in schools and support them at home. This is a challenge for the entireschool ecosystem.
Our current generation ofschoolkids understands the value of technology in their world. We need to showthem the value of technology in learning. We can’t do this just by usingtechnology to jazz up our courses in ways that make us comfortable. Rather, wehave to restructure learning in ways that are becoming more comfortable for them.
And by the way, this currentgeneration of tech-savvy students is your next generation of employees. Do youreally think they will tolerate the preponderance of traditional learningstrategies that pervade our corporate training programs today? What is nowdisrupting our schools will soon disrupt our training centers—if it hasn’talready. Count on it.
From the editor: Keeping up at DevLearn 2016
The eLearning Guild’s DevLearn Conference & Expo hasalways been about “what’s next” and this year is no different. If you enjoyedMarc’s article, here are three sessions you’d probably like to attend!
On Tuesday, November 15,Marc Rosenberg and Steve Foreman present pre-conference certificate programP24, “Implementing Ecosystem Solutions: A New Approach to What We Do.” In thisone-day workshop, you will focus on methods for implementing learning andperformance ecosystem solutions in your organization. You will explorestrategy, analysis, design, technology, metrics, and organization change as youbuild a framework that helps redefine and restructure your work to meet thechallenges ahead. If you’re interested in a new paradigm that unifies thethinking of a new and expanding role in learning and performance, this workshopis for you. If you’re looking to apply the ecosystem to an upcoming project,this workshop is also for you. Participants who would like to discuss their ownecosystem initiatives will have time to do so.
Marc Rosenberg will present “From Content Creation to Content Curation: An Emerging Critical Role,” on Wednesday, November 16.He will discuss ways to deal with the sheer size of the content now availableand to efficiently search for the reliable information you need.
On Thursday, November 17 Anders Gronstedt willpresent “How Today’s Emerging Technologies Can Redefine Your Training”—how todevelop a generation of learners who may have spent more time with video gamesthan in school.
See the rest at the DevLearn Conference & Expo 2016 web site. Register byFriday, September 30 for the Early Registration Discount!
